Hot on the heels of her second Acorn Prize for fiction, for The Axeman’s Carnival, comes Catherine Chidgey’s eighth novel, Pet, which is of course utterly brilliant. No surprises there. A bit of a thriller, Pet is set in a Catholic intermediate school in Wellington and an Auckland rest home, and packed with ideas far beyond the genre’s remit, so the risk of spoilers limits what can be said of what happens within.
A plot-and character-forward novel, with Chidgey’s trademark artful and clever themes, ideas and observations scattered through the text with the lightest of hands, Pet hurtles towards its shocking end like a speeding American muscle car.
Narrated by Justine in both 1984, when she’s in her final year of intermediate school, and 2014, when she’s an adult visiting her father, who has dementia, Pet revolves around the charismatic and increasingly mysterious Corvette-driving Mrs Price, a newish teacher at Justine’s school, St Michael’s. She’s a woman who plays favourites with her young charges, who worship her, deftly manipulating them less and less benignly as it becomes increasingly apparent there’s a petty thief in their midst. And who doesn’t like a good old-fashioned witch-hunt?
Because Chidgey is such a good storyteller, the plot and characters alone would have been more than enough to successfully carry the novel. I was genuinely on the edge of my seat for the last 30 pages and didn’t see the twists coming – because there’s more than one. But, of course, there’s much more to Pet, precisely because this is a Chidgey novel.
The book is rich in ideas and metaphors, which relate back to the central themes of guilt, bullying, racism and scapegoating, but also explore things thrown up by the characters and their circumstances, such as loss and grieving.
At the rest home, Justine’s father often wears other people’s clothes, an acute observation by Chidgey about how things like that just happen, but also a heartbreaking metaphor for the loss of self that dementia exacts from its victims. There’s also a thing with an invisible-ink security pen and messages from the afterlife that is achingly sad, and incredibly clever, but again, to reveal any more would be a spoiler of sorts, because this is the author at her most magical.
Much of the novel is set at school, and is evocative of school life in the early 80s. A couple of pages along in the first of the school chapters and I was back at my own school, walking-not-running down the hallways of Brick Block on my way to science to dissect a cow’s eye.
Chidgey doesn’t just ride the zeitgeist of late primary education in New Zealand in the 80s, though. She is also interested in the slightly wider view of the domestic and beyond, small as these lives are.
Reruns of The Love Boat feature back when there were only two TV channels. So does Miss Universe, our very own Lorraine Downes winning the year before, filling many Woman’s Weekly pages and making a nation proud.
Pet is also a compelling portrait of the curious limbo of pubescence in the 80s, which was a more innocent time. It was a time of coveting the trappings of an adulthood that the children are not quite ready for, be it a nascent interest in the opposite sex or even those ersatz Brooke Shields jeans Mrs Price wears. Then there’s the inappropriate behaviour of adults. Such as Father Lynch, who takes the students for their religious instruction and tells them graphic stories about the torture and execution of brave Catholics who died for their faith. Catholic school isn’t for the faint-hearted, that’s for sure. But that’s nothing compared with Mrs Price, the high priestess of inappropriate, who “scoops” Justine’s breasts into a bra during a fitting, sends her pet students out on errands, including picking up her prescriptions from the chemist, and pits them against each other. And that’s just for starters.
This is literary writing at its best: crisp, clean, economical and acute, with just the occasional flurry of the pretty stuff. . Every word in Pet is working to carry the story forward, and, as a result, the narrative skips along at pace. There’s no doubt Chidgey’s faithful are going to love Pet, and I suspect the novel will bring many new readers to the page as well. Another truly terrific novel from one of our most talented and hardworking writers.
Pet, by Catherine Chidgey (THWUP, $38)
